A mainstreamy, sitcommy version of Happiness, awash in splashy, trashy plot turns. Any movie whose opening line features a sulky teenage girl (in a grainy video image, but never mind that) saying directly into a camcorder, "I need a father who's a role model, not some horny geek-boy who's gonna …
Ambitious insurance clerk C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon) attempts to climb the corporate ladder by loaning his apartment key to his superiors for their extramarital affairs, but the plan backfires when Bud unwittingly falls for the top executive's current girlfriend, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). Fred MacMurray co-stars in this Billy …
Billy Wilder, who takes as his source material a French farce by Francis Veber, and who seems in general at a loss for original ideas, banks heavily on the very unoriginal idea of teaming Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon (for the third time in a Billy Wilder movie and fourth …
The basic idea -- namely, to interweave clips from actual 1940s films noirs into a parody of that genre, so that the star, Steve Martin, would appear to interact with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Fred MacMurray, Alan Ladd, et al. -- sounds at first blush as if it must …
Trash with pedigree: a novel by Cain, a script co-authored by Chandler, and fine work from Stanwyck and MacMurray, the latter of whom can always make sin look so unpleasurable. But this is not one of Billy Wilder's more personal projects, shallow and sleazy, and only conformistly cynical instead of …
Something like the fifth movie adaptation of Erich Kästner's kiddie crime classic. The 1931 version was scripted by a young Billy Wilder.
Unbuttoned Billy Wilder bedroom comedy, set in Climax, Nevada (joke). Kim Novak, a sinfully undervalued actress, is very touching as a small-town chippie with a bad head cold and some flattering blouses. Dean Martin winkingly kids his "swinger" image, and Ray Walston and Cliff Osmond overplay abominably. However, the dullsville …
A lone wolf (Jue Huang) returns home after a twenty year absence armed with a modicum of fatalistic narration with which to underscore his search for a love lost. Director Bi Gan credits Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity as his inspiration for this Chinese puzzler. A protagonist carting around a photo …
A solar eclipse descends on Cupang. The heavens have yet to completely blacken, and already several of the more backward barrio locals begin to kiss civilization goodbye. One person’s Armageddon is another person’s cottage industry, which is precisely what the town emerges as after Elsa (Nora Aunor) envisions in the …
Billy Wilder's drilling into Holmes's hush-hush side (his cocaine addiction, his rumored homosexuality, his broken heart) has a feeling of special privilege and intimacy, rather than irreverence and iconoclasm as it might have had. The opening examination of the deceased detective's personal effects is practically breath-taking; and for a while …
More isn't always better, ventures the eponymous heroine. "Sometimes it's just more." Truer words never fell on deafer ears. Sydney Pollack's update of Billy Wilder's fairy-tale-for-grownups is, by virtue of fidelity to its forebear, a well-constructed piece of work, and (major assist to cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno) a gleamingly polished one …
Sexy neighbor Marilyn Monroe fuels the extramarital fantasy of a New Yorker left to swelter while his family goes to the summer house. Directed by Billy WIlder.
In the later stage of Billy Wilder’s career, there is an evident pull toward the romantic and euphoric (Love in the Afternoon, Irma La Douce, Avanti), and there is an opposing pull toward the caustic and raucous (One Two Three, The Fortune Cookie, the Ray Walston-Cliff Osmond bits, particularly, in …